AMA: Google Developer Marketing Lead, Google Assistant, Vishal Naik on Platform Product Marketing

The biggest thing I consider is that the messaging created is about the customer and what they are thinking/feeling/experiencing. Rather than what we are building and what we are selling. I've kept a messaging template from a previous org where we focused on market context, customer pain points, a customer's unmet needs, and how all of those funnel into your org's differentiated point of view. Your product supports all of this, and your product tells a story of how your organization (nuance: not ...Read More

At DocuSign, there are product marketers across our main product categories, as well as industry and audience teams. Every company I've ever worked at has grouped their teams differently, so I tend to consider new roles based on mapping skills to company needs. If the largest TAM is in a vertical that is specialized, perhaps you'll need an industry PMM. If the biggest gap in company need is relative to product launch materials, maybe you need someone focused on building a great bill of materials ...Read More

In my opinion, the most important thing in prioritizing your messaging is finding the common denominator across your platform. Does it create a new output, or solve a new problem, or enable a new style of working, for example. Then you prioritize that in your messaging hierarchy, and use the various things that your platform does as means to support that new narrative. For example, DocuSign's platform is composed of our ecosystem, our developer tools, our foundational infrastructure and our secu ...Read More

Market research is a pretty valuable data point in terms of prioritizing verticals (or any other segmentation slice), but so too is your product ownership point of view and your internal usage data. So you don't need to lean on external research, but it can certainly augment your other efforts. I think there's value in looking at 1p, 2p and 3p input sources in coordination with each other. Where we have used external research towards our segmentation processes is when we do message testing measu ...Read More

When selling a platform, you're selling what a customer can accomplish, less what a customer is buying. Obviously in the SaaS world, a lot of our marketing is based on the product being the thing that gets a customer to a desired future state, but that's even more true when selling a platform. The big change is the customer's journey to get to that desired future state. Their path to usage is different, their stage in the purchase path is different, and the stakeholders needed in the room are di ...Read More

I view the role of a PMM as being someone who owns the full story/customer perception of a product, is the product-line CMO so to speak. Sometimes you will need to market a solution, sometimes you will need to launch a product, sometimes you will need to convince sales people to do something and sometimes you will need to create a new narrative. So as I think about product marketing for my team and what a PMM would do, it's less around a product or a solution and more around being nimble to buil ...Read More

I'm big on analogies (perhaps annoyingly so), so equate it to a concert: The Portfolio or Suite is like the band. It's the grouping of the products that you sell/come to see. The Ecosystem is like TicketMaster or StubHub. It's how you gain access to see the band/use the product if you're not walking up to the theater box office to buy a ticket. The Platform is like the stage, where the band is performing, it's connected into the sound system and lighting, and because of it, all attendees are ena ...Read More

An Engineering leader at a previous company described this to me as a tripod--decisions made based on the intersection of PM, Eng and PMM. Here PMM is representing the customer, and to an effect, also Sales opportunities. In an ideal state, you'd have this. When you don't, you'll need to understand what is driving the decisions behind what makes it into the roadmap. Is it revenue? Is it usage? Is it a PM's pride in shipping what they ideated? If its the latter, then you may not be in a position ...Read More

Great question. To be frank, even for companies with a reputation of being open and extensible, this one is always a challenge when you're in a Platform role. Because at the end of the day, the Platform is less about what products your company creates and more about what a customer can do. Thus you're always in conversations with stakeholders who have a POV that the products your company creates are the things that enable customer success. So there's the nuance where you need to decouple product ...Read More

Answering this based on the context of the question being asked from the POV of a CRM vendor looking to scale: The biggest challenge I've come across is attribution. The framework to drive consistent lead generation really focuses on the mediums, but any marketer is going to test and optimize based on what drives return in their specific org. Those decisions are going to stem from what's working and what isn't. So that portion will fall into place relatively seamlessly. The piece that's a bit ha ...Read More